In my case Ferrite is the one loosing her place . The only time I play her as captain (or at all) is when I anticipate Shark.
Otherwise Farris is great when kicking against engineers and alchemists and I really, really like bolt vs Engineers to knock down Velocity and Compound and still get a move to get into goal range or recover the ball. If shoemerang is not an option you can easily get an 8" dodge using I am open otherwise. So yeah, they stay in the 10

If you are an indecisive player because you're thinking about all the options all the time, then some beer or whatever makes you feel more relaxed helps, or at least it did help me.
Funny enough, I've clocked the effect of a single beer on my ability to solve the hardest sudoku (those that I could solve without having to go for trial and error) and the average time it took me to solve it was 90% longer than when I did not drink anything. That is the effect of a single beer on my brains when they have to think hard...
However, I noticed that the clock had a very negative effect on my learning curve. Since there was never time to ask my opponent why did he do this and that, I never really learned a lot from a game. So for the last few non-tournament games we've tried the option to stop the clock at any time and openly discuss your dilemma with your opponent and in many cases you actually do find out the better option and you will remember it the next time when you're in a similar situation, making you play a lot faster.

When making a character play such noxious blast, you suffer -1 dice on the roll to hit for each enemy model engaging the player making the play.
However, if due to the crowd-outs you are dropped to a single die and then another model engages this player, would he suffer a +1 TN or would he just keep the single die and still roll to hit enemy models on their normal DEF?

Based on how hard it is to take them out and what you get for the reward, they are definitely comparable. What they bring to the match is something completely different though, but then you could argue that most of the players cannot be compared to each other.

You take Harrow, tool up Thresher and put a harvest marker in 2" of him. Then Thresher with 5 INF takes 3" mellee and murders any one blacksmith model on the pitch.
Tater can take a good swing at another model as well and is especially good versus the lady blacksmiths.
Everything else are just nuances.
Seriously, I had Thresher come into the middle of my entire blacksmiths team once, with my entire team ganging up on him and I still couldn't kill him as the healing during his legendary turn is insane and he still managed to have TAC 6.
Even if someone manages to steal the ball from you, Thresher still has an insane reach (my opponent also regularly plays grace who gives him quick foot) and just tackles it from that model and kills it (if its an apprentice).